Can Low Variables search in P&T Assets files?
Does Low Variables let me run more granular searches in P&T Assets files? Like say I have a lot of PDFs uploaded as Assets, can Low Search search for content within them?
If not, does LV offer any more robust search functionality of Assets meta data than standard Assets tags allow?
Replies
Low 10 Jan 2014 08:37
I'm gonna go ahead and assume you mean "Low Search" everywhere you mentioned "Low Variables".
Low Search doesn't have specific Assets support, in the sense that it can search the Assets tables. It just searches the channel_data table, and the contents that Assets puts in there. As far as I can tell, that's limited to the file names.
A custom search filter could be built to allow for extended Assets search. That would still return entries rather than the files themselves. Also, Assets could make use of Low Search's API for extended support for keyword searches.
ZenBug 10 Jan 2014 15:20
Yes, sorry about that. I was a little overtired when I posted. I did indeed mean Low Search, not Low Variables.
Thanks for the help, Low!
Elliot 9 May 2014 15:07
I'd like to bump this please. Can it go in as a feature request as well.
I have a client that has a lot of PDFs in Assets and they'd like to have the search results contain these listings as well. I thought maybe as a temporary solution they could use Assets keyword meta-data but Low Search doesn't search any of Assets fields(?).
'A custom search filter could be built to allow for extended Assets search'. So is this possible? If so, can you point me in the right direction to code this?
Low 11 May 2014 09:41
If Assets were fully searchable, this will still only work if an Asset was assigned to an entry, because Low Search will always return entries.
The way to build a custom filter, is to create a search extension using the low_search_pre_search hook, reading the parameters, querying the Assets tables which should result in any amount of entry_ids, and setting the entry_id="" parameter to limit the search to those ids.
Elliot 12 May 2014 11:08
Perfect I'll have a go at the extension. For this site it makes no all PDF's do have an entry. I'd forgotten you can even use Assets in that way, ie without an EE entry.